Participation in LEADER regions: mobilisation of different groups, decision-making and activation of voluntary commitment

Community dynamism has to grow at the local level, but there are also options to encourage such developments by means of funding programmes. One example for collective mobilisation are Local Actions Groups (LAGs) as a crucial element of LEADER, which is an EU funding scheme from for Community-Led Local Development (CLLD). LEADER is a place-based, participatory approach which brings together public, private and civil society organisations. Within LEADER, these different stakeholders form an LAG as a type of a public-private partnership. These groups collaborate on the basis of an integrated local development strategy (LDS) and administer own budgets to support projects. To give insights about the implementation of this way of collective mobilisation, we use results from the evaluation of Rural Development Programmes (2014-2022) in Northrhine-Westfalia with 28 LAGs, which is part of a wider evaluation project in four federal states in Germany with 115 LAGs in total. This paper highlights different dimensions of participation and addresses the following questions: • Mobilisation of different groups: What is the institutional origin and socio-demographic profile (gender, age) of the participants? Are there special options to mobilise groups which are usually underrepresented? • Decision-making: Have suitable processes for decision-making in these governance arrangements been established? What are differences in the satisfaction of different groups of stakeholders (civil society, economy, state)? • Activation of voluntary commitment: What kinds of local resources are activated in project implementations?